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NELSON, MAGGIE, 1973

BLUETS I MAGGIE NELSON. 1ST ED.

P. CM.

ISBN 978-1 933517 40-7 (PBK. ALK. PAPER )

I. TITLE.

PS3564.E4687B56 2009

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2009005830

DESIGNED AND COMPOSED BY QUEMADURA

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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FIRST EDITION

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And were it trne, we do not think all philosophy

is worth one hour of pain. PAscAL, Pensees

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excre­ ment coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became some­ how personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color-in this case, the color blue-as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay un­ der and get out from under, in turns. BLU ETS

3· Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant fo r a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that con­ tains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

4· I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneli­ ness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke-take your pick-an apprehension of the di­ vine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

5· But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Ste­ phane Mallarme wrote to his fr iend Henri Cazalis: "These last months have been terrifYing. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has sufferedduring that long agony, is in-

2 BLU ETS

describable." Mallarme described this agony as a battle that took place on God's "honey wing." "I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage-God-whom I fo rtunately defeated and threw to earth," he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarme began replacing "le ciel" with "l'Azur" in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. "Fortunately," he wrote Cazalis, "I am quite dead now."

6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love's primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To fnd oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

7· But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fo ol yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so lit­ tle blue fo od in nature-in fa ct blue in the wild tends to

3 BLUETS

mark fo od to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)-that culi­ nary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving fo od. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it fe eds it in others. Yo u might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, frst stain­ ing your fngers with it, then staining the world. Yo u might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a vir­ gin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not be­ cause it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not in­ terested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God fo rbid fo r any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you.

g. So please do not write to tell me about any more beau­ tiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you

4 BLUETS

about any, either. It will not say, Isn't X beautiful?Such demands are murderous to beauty.

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my in­ dex fnger. Its muteness.

11. That is to say: I don't care if it's colorless.

12. And please don't talk to me about "things as they are" being changed upon any "blue guitar." What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.

13. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am cur­ rently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this fo r years without writing a word. It is, per­ haps, my way of making my life feel "in progress" rather than a sleeve of ash falling off alit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.

5 BLUETS

14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a hook about blue without actually doing it. Mostly what hap­ pens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and then you can play with these things instead of with words. Over the past decade I have been given blue inks, paintings, postcards, dyes, bracelets, rocks, precious stones, watercolors, pigments, paperweights, goblets, and candies. I have been introduced to a man who had one of his front teeth replaced with lapis lazuli, solely because he loved the stone, and to another who worships blue so devoutly that he refuses to eat blue fo od and grows only blue and white flowers in his garden, which surrounds the blue ex-cathedral in which he lives. I have met a man who is the primary grower of organic in­ digo in the world, and another who sings J oni Mitchell's Blue in heartbreaking drag, and another with the face of a derelict whose eyes literally leaked blue, and I called this one the prince of blue, which was, in fact, his name.

15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.

6 BLUETS

16. But you talk of all this jauntily, when really it is more like you have been mortally ill, and these correspon­ dents send pieces of blue news as if last-ditch hopes fo r a cure.

17. But what goes on in you when you talk about color as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your dis- ease.

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. Yo u slept, so it was my se­ cret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue's pants at the Chelsea Ho-

7 BLUETS

tel. But what if the prince of blue's unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. Fo r it can­ not give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

21. Different dream, same period: Out at a house by the shore, a serious landscape. There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love. Afterward it was time fo r rough magic: to cast the spell I had to place each blue object (two mar­ bles, a miniature fe ather, a shard of azure glass, a string of lapis) into my mouth, then hold them there while they discharged an unbearable milk. When I looked up you were escaping on a skiff, suddenly wanted. I spit out the objects in a snaky blue paste on my plate and offered to help the police boat look for you, but they said the cur­ rents were too unusual. So I stayed behind, and became

8 BLUETS known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal.

22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip offyour life, like a skin of congealed paint torn offthe top of a can. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A fr iend had been in an acci­ dent. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri­ winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my fr iend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.

9 BLUETS

23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as "a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note." Goethe himself de­ scribes the period as one inwhich "a quiet, collectedstate of mind was out of the question." Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS , a death he also fo recast on filmas disappearing into a "blue screen." Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour dur­ ing the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacter­ istically boring. "That which I am writing about so te­ diously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit," he wrote.

24. "In view ofthe fact that Goethe's explanation of color makes no physical sense at all," one critic recently noted, "one might wonder whyit is considered appropriate to

10 BLUETS

reissue this English translation." Wittgenstein put it this way: "This much I understand: that a physical theory (such as Newton's) cannot solve the problems that moti­ vated Goethe, even if he himself didn't solve them ei­ ther." So what were Goethe's problems?

25. Goethe was interested in the case of "a lady, who, af­ ter a fall by which an eye was bruised, saw alob jects, hut especially white objects, glittering in colours, even to an intolerable degree." This story is but one of many Goethe relates of people whose vision has been injured or altered and who seemingly never heal, even when the cause of the injury is psychological or emotional in nature. "This indicates extreme weakness of the organ, its inability to recover itself," he observes.

26. After my fr iend's accident, I began to think of this lady of the bruised eye and these glittering white objects with more fr equency. Could such a phenomenon be hap­ pening to me, with blue, by proxy? I've heard that a di­ minishment of color vision often accompanies depres­ sion, though I do not have any idea how or why such a

11 BLUETS

thing is neurologically possible. So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors-or, more oddly, just one color-more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypo­ mania? Shock? Love? Grief?

27. But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

28. It was around this time that I frst had the thought: we fu ck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often. I had no idea how true it would prove, or how painful, outside of the fucking.

29. If a color cannot cure, can it at least incite hope? The blue collage you sent me so long ago fr om Africa, fo r ex­ ample, made me hopeful. But not, to be honest, because of its blues.

30. If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair? I can think of many occasions on which a blue has made me fe el suddenly hopeful (turn­ ing one's car around a sharp curve on a precipice and

12 BLUETS abruptly fnding ocean; fipping on the light in a strang­ er's bathroom one presumed to be white but which was, in fact, robin-egg blue; coming across a collection of navy blue bottle tops pressed into cement on the Williamsburg Bridge, or a shining mountain of broken blue glass out­ side a glass factory in Mexico), but fo r the moment, I can't think of any times that blue has caused me to despair.

31. Consider the case of Mr. Sidney Bradford, however, whose corneal opacities were grafted away at the age of fifty-two. After his vision was restored, he became unex­ pectedly disconsolate. "He found the world drab, and was upset by faking paint and other blemishes; he liked bright colours, but became depressed when they faded." Not long after he gained vision and saw the world in full color, he "died in unhappiness."

.)2.When I say "hope," I don't mean hope fo r anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it's worth it to keep one's eyes open. "What are all those I fuzzy-looking things out there? I Trees? Well, I'm tired I of them": the last words of William Carlos Williams's English grand­ mother.

13 BLUETS

33· I must admit that not all blues thrill me. I am not overly interested in the matte stone of turquoise, for example, and a tepid, faded indigo usually leaves me cold. Some­ times I worry that if I am not moved by a blue thing, I may be completely despaired, or dead. At times I fake my en­ thusiasm. At others, I fe ar I am incapable of communi­ cating the depth of it.

34· Acyanoblepsia: non-perception of blue. A tier of hell, to be sure-albeit one that could be potentially correc­ ted by Viagra, one of whose side effects is to see the world tinged with blue. The expert on guppy menopause, whose officeis across from mine at the Institute, tells me this. He says it has something to do with a protein in the penis that bears a similarity to a protein in the retina, but beyond that I cannot fo llow.

35· Does the world look bluer fr om blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).

36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than en-

14 BLUETS

liven." Is to he in love with blue, then, to he in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to he in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you hack?

37· Are you sure-one would like to ask-that it cannot love you hack?

38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, fo r instance, flying into the fo lds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal.

39· The Encyclopedia does not help. "If normally our perception of color involves 'false consciousness,' what is the right way to think of colors?" it asks. "In the case of color, unlike other cases," it concludes, "false conscious­ ness should he a cause fo r celebration."

40. When I talk about color and hope, or color and de­ spair, I am not talking about the red of a stoplight, a peri-

15 BLUETS

winkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, or a

black sail strung from a ship's mast. I am trying to talk

about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart

from meaning.

41. On the eve of the millennium, driving through the

Valley of the Moon. On the radio a DJ was going through

the best albums of the century, and somewhere, I think

around number thirty, was Joni Mitchell's Blue. The DJ

played "River," and said that its greatness lies in the fact

that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapolo­

getically before: I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfishand I'm

sad. Progress! I thought. Then came the song's next line: No w I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had.

42. Sitting in my officebefore teaching a class on prosody,

trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Wa s I too blue for you.

Wa s I too blue. I look down at my lecture notes: Hear!­ break is a spondee. Then I lay my head down on the desk

and start to weep. -Whydoesn't this help?

16 BLUETS

43· Before a faculty meeting, talking again with the expert on guppy menopause. Wh at do biologists make of the question, Does color exist? I ask. Duh, he says. A male guppy looking for a mate doesn't worry about whether color exists, he says. A male guppy only cares about be­ ing orange, in order to attract one. But can it really be said that the guppy cares about being orange?I ask. No, he ad­ mits. The male guppy simply is orange. Why orange? I ask. He shrugs. In the face of some questions, he says, bi­ ologists can only vacate the field.

44· This particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that af­ ternoon, a therapist will say to me, Ifhe hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. She is try­ ing to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

45· This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why;

I can't answer. Instead I say something about how clinical

17 BLUETS

psychology forces everything we call love into the patho­

logical or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that

if what I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit

that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved

a had man. How all of these formulations drain the blue

right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fsh fap­

ping on a cutting hoard on a kitchen counter.

46. Disavowal, says the silence.

47· Is there a good kind of hustler ? I wonder, as I steer my

car through the forest of gargantuan billboards, ghostly

palm trees, and light-fattened boulevards that have he­

come my life.

48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a

whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional.

Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, al­

ways in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in

an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this

person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and

you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto

18 BLUETS

it, as if there is no other activity on God's given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way?

49· There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.

50. The confusion about what color is, where it is, or whether it is persists despite thousands of years of prod­ ding at the phenomenon. And literally prodding: in his zeal, in the "dark chamber" of his room at Trinity College,

Newton at times took to sticking iron rods or sticks in his eyes to produce then analyze his perceptions of color.

Children whose vision has been damaged have been known to smash their fngers into their eyes to recreate color sensations that have been lost to them. (That's the spirit!)

51. Youmight as well act as if objects had the colors, the En­ cyclopedia says. -Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?

19 BLUETS

52. Tr y, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from

a single physical phenomenon. Keep in mind the effects

of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-sources, flms,

expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature,

elasticity, on color. Think of an object's capacity to emit,

reflect,absorb, transmit, or scatter light; think of "the op­

eration of light on a feather." Ask yourself, what is the

color of a puddle? Is your blue sofa still blue when you

stumble past it on your way to the kitchen for water in the

middle of the night; is it still blue if you don't get up, and

no one enters the room to see it? Fifteen days after we are

born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the

rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we fnd

ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once,

and we call the whole shimmering mess "color." You

might even say that it is the business of the eye to make

colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This

is how we "get around" in the world. Some might also call

it the source of our suffering.

53· "We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an

intrinsic quality of the physical object" -this is the so-

20 BLUETS

called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I be­ lieved in you.

54· Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythago­ ras, Euclid, Hip parch us) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or "felt," what we saw. (Aristotle pointed out that this hypothesis runs into trouble at night, as objects become invisible despite the eyes' purported power.) Others, like Epicurus, pro­ posed the inverse-that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out toward the eye, as if they were looking at us (and surely some of them are). Plato split the difference, and postulated that a "visual fire" burns be­ tween our eyes and that which they behold. This still seems fair enough.

55· One image of the intellectual: a man who loses his eye­ sight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton). I try to avoid generalities when it comes to the business of gender, but in all honesty I must admit thatI simply cannot conceive of a version of female

21 BLUETS

intelligence that would advocate such a thing. An "abor­

tion of the mind, this purity" (W. C. Williams).

56. There are, however, many stories of women-partic­

ularly saints-blinding themselves in order to maintain

their chastity, to prove that they "only have eyes" for God

or Christ. Consider, for example, the legend of Saint

Lucy, patron saint of the blind, whose name means "clear,

radiant, understandable." What seems clear enough: in

304 AD Lucy was tortured and put to death by the Roman

emperor Diocletian, and thus martyred for her Christian­

ity. What is unclear: why, exactly, she runs around Gothic

and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her

blue eyes staring weirdly out from it. Some say her eyes

were tortured out of her head in her martyrdom; some say

she gouged them out herself after being sentenced by the

pagan emperor to be defled in a brothel. Even more un­

clear are the twinned legends of Saint Medana (of Ire­

land) and Saint Tr iduana (of Scotland), two Christian

princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan

lovers-lovers who professed to be unable to live without

their beloveds' beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the

22 BLUETS

unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor's feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore hers out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer.

57· In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other ac­ counts wonder whether they were in fact punishing them­ selves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

58. "Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (Leo­ nardo da Vinci).

59· There are those, however, who like to look. And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head. "I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock," writes Catherine Millet in her beautiful sex memoir, be­ fore going on to describe how she also loves to look at the

23 BLUETS

"brownish crater" of her asshole and the "crimson val­

ley" of her pussy, each opened wide-its color laid bare­

for the fucking.

6o. I like to look, too. "Saint Lucy, you did not hide your

light under a basket," begins one Catholic prayer.

61. In his book On Being Blue, William Gass argues that

what we readers really want is "the penetration of pri­

vacy": "We want to see under the skirt." But his penetra­

tion is eventually tiresome, even to himself: "What good

is my peek at her pubic hair if I must also see the red lines

made by her panties, the pimples on her rump, broken

veins like the print of a lavender thumb, the stepped-on

look of a day's-end muff ? I've that at home." After assert­

ing that the blue we want from life is in fact found only in

fiction, he counsels the writer to "give up the blue things

of this world in favor of the words which say them."

62. This is puritanism, not eros. For my part I have no in­

terest in catching a glimpse of or offeringyou an unblem­

ished ass or an airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having

24 BLUETS

three orifices stuffedfull of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light. I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the altar. Your loss.

63. Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape. The rocks I dug up this summer in the north country, for example, each one mys­ teriously painted round its belly with a bright blue band.

The little square junk of navy blue dye you brought me long ago, when we barely knew each other, folded neatly into a paper wrapper.

64. It was around this time that I was planning to travel to many famously blue places: ancient indigo and woad production sites, the Chartres Cathedral, the Isle of Skye, the lapis mines of Afghanistan, the Scrovegni Chapel,

Morocco, Crete. I made a map, I used colored pins, etc.

But I had no money. So I applied for grant after grant, de­ scribing how exciting, how original, how necessary my

25 BLUETS

exploration of blue would be. In one application, written

and sent late at night to a conservative Ivy League uni­

versity, I described myself and my project as heathen, he­

donistic, and horny. I never got any funding. My blues

stayed local.

65. The instructions printed on the blue junk's wrapper: Wr ap Blue in cloth. Stir while squeezing the Blue in the last rinsing water. Dip articles separatelyfor a short time; keep

them moving. I liked these instructions. I like blues that

keep moving.

66. Yesterday I picked up a speck of blue I'd been eyeing

for weeks on the ground outside my house, and found it

to be a poison strip for termites. No li me tangere, it said,

as some blues do. I left it on the ground.

67. A male satin bowerbird would not have left it there. A

male satin bowerbird would have tottered with it in his

beak over to his bower, or his "trysting place," as some

field guides put it, which he spends weeks adorning with

blue objects in order to lure a female. Not only does the BLUETS

bowerbird collect and arrange blue objects-bus tickets, cicada wings, blue fowers, bottle caps, blue feathers plucked off smaller blue birds that he kills, if he must, to get their plumage-but he also paints his bower with juices from blue fruits, using the frayed end of a twig as a paintbrush. He builds competitively, stealing treasures from other birds, sometimes trashing their bowers en­ tirely.

68. After building his bower, the satin bowerbird makes a stage nearby out of shiny yellow grass, upon which he will sing and dance for passing females. Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experi­ enced builders sometimes don't attract any females at all.

Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone.

6g. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species.

27 BLUETS

70. AmI trying, with these "propositions," to build some

kind of bower? -But surely this would be a mistake. For

starters, words do not look like the things they designate

(Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to fnd dignity

in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude.

Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the

problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?

-No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no

arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of

wink-Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

73· In his Opticks, Newton periodically refers to an in­

valuable "assistant" who helps him refract the shaft of

sunlight streaming in through the aperture Newton had

drilled into the wall of his "dark chamber"-an assistant

to Newton's discovery, or revelation, of the spectrum.

Over time, however, many have questioned whether this

assistant ever really existed. Many now believe him to be,

essentially, a "rhetorical fction." BLUETS

74· Who, nowadays, watches the light stream through the walls of her "dark chamber" with the company of a phan­ tasmagoric assistant, or smashes at her eyes to reproduce lost color sensations, or stays up all night watching col­ ored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

75· Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sad­ ness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

76. At one point in history, to approximate the color of ul­ tramarine, which comes from lapis, which for quite some time was available in only one mine, in what we now call

Afghanistan-Sar-e-Sang, the Place of the Stone-and had to be journeyed out via hundreds of miles of treach­ erous trade roads, Westerners would churn up cheaper pigments with blood and copper. Generally speaking we don't do this anymore. We don't store our oils in the blad­ ders of pigs. We go to the store. If we want to know what a phosphene is, we don't mash our fsts into our eyes. We

Coogle the word. If you're depressed, you take a pill.

Some of these pills are bright blue. If you're lonely,

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there's a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he

has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey's. He

has posted a photograph to prove it.

77· "Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the

Milky Way?" (Thoreau).

78. Once I traveled to the Tate in London to see the blue

paintings of Yves Klein, who invented and patented his

own shade of ultramarine, International Klein Blue (IKB),

then painted canvases and objects with it throughout ape­

riod of his life he dubbed "l'epoque bleue." Standing in

front of these blue paintings, or propositions, at the Tate,

feeling their blue radiate out so hotly that it seemed to be

touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs, I wrote but

one phrase in my notebook: too much. I had come all this

way, and I could barely look. Perhaps I had inadvertently

brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlighten­

ment is the ultimate disappointment. "From the mountain

you see the mountain," wrote Emerson.

79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one

wants to spend one's life in a world made of it. "Life is a

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train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus," wrote Emerson. To find one­ self trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly.

So. What I have heard: when the mines of Sar-e-Sang run dry (locals say the repressive rule of the Taliban, who, in

2000, blew up the two giant statues of Buddha at the mines' entrance-Buddhas whose blue auras were the oldest-known application of lapis on earth-caused a particularly long dry spell; God only knows what the

American bombing has done since), the miners use dy­ namite to bleed a vein, in hopes of starting a "blue rush."

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

82. I have made efforts, howeverftful, to live within other beads. During one particularly despondent New York

City winter, I bought a huge can of bright yellow paint at the hardware store on Allen Street, imagining that I might

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buoy my soul with its cheer. When I got home and pried

off the lid I realized they'd given me the wrong color, or

maybe it was the right one, but at home it looked garish

-like "death warmed over," as they say. It was a terrible

yellow, a yellow of utter rage. Later I learned that nearly

all cultures have considered yellow in isolation one of, if

not the least attractive of all colors. I painted everything

with it.

83. I tried to go with the theme: I bought a yellow journal.

On its cover sheet I wrote a slogan of penetration: Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate,Jor all things are man­ ifestin the sight of heaven.

84. I hated that time and I hated that apartment and soon

after I painted everything yellow I moved out. I looked at

dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of

the one I moved into next I knew I could live there be­

cause it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My

friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the

last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold

and anyway I don't live there anymore.

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85. One afternoon in 2006, at a bookstore in Los Angeles. I pick up a hook called The Deepest Blue. Having ex­ pected a chromatic treatise, I am embarrassed when I see the subtitle: How Wo men Fa ce and Overcome Depression. I quickly return it to its shelf. Eight months later, I order the hook online.

86. The implication of the title is that men get blue, hut women get the deepest blue. Another fo rm of aggrandize­ ment, to he sure-one which brings to mind a night I spent in an emergency room in Brooklyn years ago­ some mystery ailment, a burning in my lower left side-a woman wailing in the waiting room about having gas fr om fr ied chicken, though she looked riddled with crack and sadness, not gas from fried chicken-a young doctor in­ side asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10-I was flummoxed, I felt as though I shouldn't he there at ali-I said "6"-he said to the nurse, Wr ite down "8," since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say "n," he said. I didn't believe him, hut I supposed he might know.

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87. "Great suffering,joy, exertion, is not for [woman]; her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man's without being essentially happier or unhappier," wrote Schopenhauer. What women, one would like to ask, did he know? At any rate, would that it were so.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifYingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "rid."

8g. As if we could scrape the color offthe iris and still see.

go. Last night I wept in a way I haven't wept fo r some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like en­ graved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.

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91. Blue-eye, archaic: "a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause."

92. Eventually I confess to a fr iend some details about my weeping-its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in fr ont of a mirror not to infame self-pity, but because we want to fe el witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflectionbe a witness? Can one pass oneselfthe sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)

93· "At first glance, it seems strange to think that an in­ nocuous, inborn behavior such as crying could he dys­ functional or symptomatic," writes one clinical psychol­ ogist. But, this psychologist insists, we must face the fact that some crying is simply "maladaptive, dysfunctional, or immature."

94· -Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunc­ tion talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talk­ ing, always talking to you.

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95· But please don't write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping.

96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because he keeps "a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere" (Lowell, 1870) . This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil.

97· And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

98. Vincent van Gogh, whose depression, some say, was likely related to temporal lobe epilepsy, famously saw and painted the world in almost unbearably vivid colors. Af­ ter his nearly unsuccessful attempt to take his life by shooting himself in the gut, when asked why he should not be saved, he famously replied, "The sadness will last fo rever." I imagine he was right.

99· After a few months in the hospital, my injured fr iend is visited by a fe llow quadriparalytic as part of an out- BLUETS

reach program. From her bed she asks him, If I remain paraf:yzed, how long will it take for my injury to feellike a normal part of my life? At least five years, he told her. As of next month, she will be at three.

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But re­ ally this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year fr om now you're go­ ing to fe el the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my fe elings haven't really changed.

101. "The years of the second war, and the decades af­ ter, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to," says a character in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.After reading this I polled several fr iends to see how much time they would grant between "a blinding, bad time" and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of my friends -I imagine that most Americans would give themselves

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about a year, maybe two, before they castigated them­ selves into some fo rm of yanking up the bootstraps. On September 21, 2001, fo r example, George Bush II told the country that the time fo r grief had passed, and the time fo r resolute action had taken its place.

102. After my fr iend's accident I take care of her. It is al­ ways taking care, but it is difficult, because attimes to take care of her is also to cause her pain. For two years, to get her in and out of her wheelchair, we have to perform a complicated maneuver called "the transfer." "The trans­ fe r" often sends her legs into excruciating spasms, during which time all I can do is press down on them and say, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, until the shaking stops. She has dif­ fuse nerve pain along the surface of her skin which no doctor understands, pain she says makes her skin fe el like crinkly, burning Saran Wrap. We look at her skin together as she describes this pain.

103. When the pain is bad it drains her color. When it breaks through the drugs, of which there are many, she says it fe els like a scrim goes up between her and the rest BLUETS

of the world. In my mind's eye, I imagine it as an invisi­ ble jacket of burn hovering between us.

104. I do not fe el my fr iend's pain, but when I uninten­ tionally cause her pain I wince as if I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I'm so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, fo r to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because shehas never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her acci­ dent or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

105. There are no instruments fo r measuring color; there are no "color thermometers." How could there be, as "color knowledge" always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn't stop a certain Horace

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Benedict de Saussure, however, fr om inventing, in 1789, a device he called the "cyanometer,"with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky.

106. When I frst heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually "invented" was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 num­ bered swatches, or "nuances," as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Hum­ boldt's Travels (Ross, 1852): "We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith ap­

peared to correspond to 41 o of the cyanometer." This lat­ ter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further-either into knowledge, or into beauty.

107. Many people do not think the writing of Gertrude Stein "means" anything. Perhaps it does not. But when my students complain that they want to throw Tender Buttons across the room, I try to explain to them that in it Stein is dealing with a matter of pressing concern. Stein BLUETS

is worried about hurt colors, I tell them. "A spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing," I read aloud, scanning the room fo r a face that also shows signs of being worried about hurt colors. "Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer." "A cool red rose and a pink cut pink." As if color could be further revealed by slitting.

108. Think, fo r example, of Leonard Cohen's "famous blue raincoat," whose principal attribute is that it is "torn at the shoulder." Perhaps it is even the tear that makes it famous. The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line-"Sincerely, L. Cohen"-as it makes me fe el less alone in composing almost everything I write as a let­ ter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful ex­ periment. "When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object," wrote Thoreau during his bitter falling-out with Emerson, unwittingly offering a cogent explanation of how and why so many

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songwriters have personifed blue as the one fr iend they can count on. It "loves me when I'm lonely / And thinks of me first," sings Lucinda Williams. But really this is very strange-as if blue not only had a heart, hut also a mind.

109. Over time my injured fr iend's feet have become blue and smooth from disuse. Their blue is the blue of skim milk, their smoothness that of a baby's. I think they look and fe el very strange and beautiful. She does not agree. How could she-this is her body; its transformations, her grief. Often we examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry in­ dependent of us both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like "pebbles in water," they remain ours; us, theirs.

no. In Tender Buttons, Stein seems particularly worried about color and pain that seem to come from nowhere, fo r no reason. "Why is there a single piece of any color ... Why is there so much useless suffering." About blue it­ self, Stein offers but this koan: "Every bit of blue is pre­ cocious."

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111. Goethe also worries about colors and pain, though his reports sound more like installments fr om the bat­ tlefield: "Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and fo rces the organ to opposition." Instantly I recognize this phenomenon to be true from my years of working in a bright orange restaurant. I worked in this restaurant fo r ten-hour shifts, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., some­ times later. The restaurant was incredibly orange. In fact everyone in town called it "the orange restaurant." Ye t every time I came home from work and passed out in my smoke-drenched clothes, my fe et propped up on the wall, the dining room reappeared in my dreams as pale blue. For quite some time I thought this was luck, or wish ful­ fillment-naturally my dreams would convert everything to blue, because of my love fo r the color. But now I real­ ize that it was more likely the result of spending ten hours or more staring at saturated orange, blue's spectral oppo­ site. This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or with­ out our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains un­ decided.

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112. At times I have heard it said that we don't dream in color. But surely this is a mistake. Not only can we dream in color, but more importantly: how could anyone else know if we do or do not? At times I have been tempted to think that we dream more colorfully now because of the cinema. (To know what dreams were like before the cin­ ema!) But then I think of "The Dream of the Rood," one of the frst documents in Old English, fr om around the eighth century, which fickers with color (and with pleas­ ure, and with pain): "Behold I shall tell of a most mar­ velous dream ... It seemed to me that I saw a tree, more wonderful than any other, spring high aloft, bathed in light, brightest of wood. All that beacon was covered in gold ...Wo nderful was the triumphant tree, and I stained with sin, wounded with wrongdoing ...I was sadly trou­ bled, afraid of that fair sight. I saw that beacon, change­ able, alter in clothes and color: now it was wet with mois­ ture, drenched with blood's flowing, now adorned with treasure." The question of whether gold counts as a color may here arise, but I am not equipped to tackle it. I will relay only this: "What is on the other side of gold is the

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same as what is on this side" (John Berger); I'm tempted to think this disqualifies it. The red of the dreamer's wrongdoing, however, appears nonnegotiable.

113. In his unfnished novel Heinrich von Ojterdingen, Novalis tells the story of a medieval troubadour who sees a little blue fower-perhaps a bluet-in a dream. After­ ward he longs to see the blue flower in "real life." "I can't get rid of the idea," he says. "It haunts me." (Mallarme, too: "Je suis hantC. IJAzur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur!") Hein­ rich knows his obsession is a little singular: "For who would he so concerned about a flower in this world? And I've never heard of anyone being in love with a flower." Nonetheless, he devotes his life to searching fo r it: thus hegins the adventure, the high romance, the romance of seeking.

114. But now think of the Dutch expression: "Dat zijn maar blauwe bloempjes "-"Those are nothing but blue flowers." In which case "blue flowers" means a pack of bald-faced lies.

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115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error.

n6. One of the last times you came to see me, you were wearing a pale blue button-down shirt, short-sleeved. I wore this for you, you said. We fucked for six hours straight that afternoon, which does not seem precisely possible but that is what the clock said. We killed the time. Yo u were on your way to a seaside town, a town of much blue, where you would be spending a week with the other woman you were in love with, the woman you are with now. I'm in love with you both in completely diferent ways, you said. It seemed unwise to contemplate this statement any further.

117. "How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement."

n8. Not long after that afternoon I came across a photo­ graph of you with this woman. You were wearing the shirt. I went over to the house of my injured fr iend and BLUETS told her the story as I moved her legs in and out of the inflatable, thigh-high boots she wears to compress her legs while lying down so as to inhibit the fo rmation of blood clots. How ghastly, she said. ug. My fr iend was a genius before her accident, and she remains a genius now. The difference is that these days it is nearly impossible to discount her pronouncements. Something about her condition has bestowed upon her the quality of an oracle, perhaps because now she gener­ ally stays in one place, and one must go unto her. Eventu­ allyyou will have to give up this love, she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid heart.

120. In the end, climactically rebuffed, young Werther shoots himself in the head while wearing a blue coat-a coat which is a replica of the one he was wearing the night he frst danced with his beloved. It then takes him all night to die a bloody death that inspired a rash of copycat, blue­ coated suicides all over Germany and beyond. Note that here, as elsewhere, seeing clearly seems to take We rther, and us, no further.

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121. "Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes fo r truth itself," wrote Joseph Joubert, the French "man of letters" who re­ corded countless such fr agments in notebooks fo r forty years in preparation for a monumental work of philoso­ phy that he never wrote. I know all about this passing for truth. At times I think it quite possible that it lies, as if a sleight of hand, at the heart of all my writing.

122. "Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen," wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy.

123. Whenever I speak of faith, I am not speaking of faith in God. Likewise, when I speak of doubt, I am not talk­ ing about doubting God's existence, or the truth of any gospel. Such terms have never meant very much to me. To contemplate them reminds me of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey: you get spun around until you wander off, disoriented and blindfolded, walking gingerly with a hand stretched out in front of you, until you either run into a wall (laughter), or a fr iend gently pushes you back toward the game. BLUETS

124. On this account I am prepared to call myself a "spir­ itual cripple," as a Japanese critic once said of Sei Sho­ nagon, author of the famous Makurano Soshi, or "Notes of the Pillow." This critic was appalled by Shonagon's obsession with trivia, aesthetics, and gossip, her hostility toward men, and by her unbridled, unrepentantly mali­ cious comments about others, especially those of lower classes. A few of the pillow book's many lists: "Things that give a pathetic impression," "Things without merit," "People who seem to suffer."

125. Of course, you could also just take offthe blindfold and say, I think this game is stupid, and I'm not playing it anymore. And it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering offin the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

126. One of Shonagon's frst entries describes her delight in the Festival of Blue Horses, a day on which twenty-one glorious gray-blue horses from the Imperial stables are paraded in front of the Emperor. Reading her account, I fe el at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand

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years ago, so as to see this parade for myself. But here we are in great danger-the danger of being jealous of the blues of others, or of blues of times past. For while one may repeatedly insist that all one wants is to he satisfed and happy, the truth is that one can often fnd oneself clinging to samsara with a vengeance. This is especially so when one starts to get the sense-however dim-that there might in fact he a way to unloose oneself fr om the wheel. "Nostalgia fo r samsara," some Buddhists call this affliction,the talons of which seem to grow hut sharper as soon as one hegins to understand the importance of es­ caping them.

127. Ask yourself: what is the color of a jacaranda tree in bloom? You once described it to me as "a type of blue." I did not know then if I agreed, fo r I had not yet seen the tree.

128. When you first told me about the jacarandas I felt hopeful. Then, the firsttime I saw them myself, I felt de­ spair. The next season, I fe lt despair again. And so we ar­ rive at one instance, and then another, upon which blue

50 BLUETS delivered a measure of despair. But truth be told: I saw them as purple.

129. I don't know how the jacarandas will make me feel next year. I don't know if I will be alive to see them, or if I will he here to see them, or if I will ever he able to see them as blue, even as a type of blue.

130. We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a fo rm of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.

131. "I just don't fe el like you're trying hard enough," one fr iend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?

132. That is to say: I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another fr iend says he does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of civil disobedience, he says. Let the police peel you up.

133· I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith. BLUETS

134. It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave-a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Kr ishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fillyour pouch with stones good fo r sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

135. Of course one can have "the blues" and stay alive, at least fo r a time. "Productive," even (the perennial conso­ lation!). See, fo r example, "Lady Sings the Blues": "She's got them bad I She feels so sad I Wa nts the world to know I Just what her blues is all about." Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move to­ ward darkness.

136. "Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire,"I read in another self-help book at the

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bookstore. Wh at depression ever felt like afire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf.

137· It is unclear what Holiday means, exactly, when she sings, "But now the world will know j She's never gonna sing 'em no more jNo more." Whatis unclear: whether she is moving on, shutting up, or going to die. Also un­ clear: the source of her triumphance.

138. But perhaps there is no real mystery here at all. "Life is usually stronger than people's love fo r it" (Adam Phil­ lips): this is what Holiday's voice makes audible. To hear it is to understand why suicide is both so easy and so difficult: to commit it one has to stamp out this native tri­ umphance, either by training oneself, over time, to deha­ bilitate or disbelieve it (drugs help here), or by force of ambush.

139. "Memory is blue in the head? Heads are easily taken off"(Lorine Niedecker).

140. How to take it off: I could drink every single drop of alcohol in my house, which includes the rest of this beer

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and a bottle of Maker's Mark. I could let myself be fucked mercilessly by many strangers at once, as in my frst sex­ ual fantasy: I am sent halfWay across the world in a card­ board box with a lot of postage on it. The journey is long and rough and invariably involves much jostling by cam­ els. When I arrive, a tribe of men opens the box under a hot desert sun, and out spills my small body. They are all eager to touch it.

141. I have also imagined my life ending, or simply evap­ orating, by being subsumed into a tribe of blue people. I dreamed of these blue people as a child, long before I knew that such people actually existed. Now I know that they do, in the eastern and central Sahara desert, and that they are called Tuareg, which means "abandoned by God." I also know that many We sterners-including sev­ eral We sternwomen-have shared in this fantasy. I know that it bears all the marks of an unforgivable exoticism. But the fact remains that I have been dreaming about these blue people fo r a long time-long before I knew the story of Isabelle Eberhardt, fo r example, who left Switz­ erland fo r North Africa as a young child, cross-dressed

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as a man her entire life, and eventually got lost among a mystical sect in the desert called the Qadriya before dying in a flash flood in Ain Sefra, her body "carried down­ stream along with scores of other corpses" and eventually crushed by a beam. In the rubble of this flood was found a partial manuscript of her hook, The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one ofthe strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world." Its first story hegins: "Long and white, the road twists like a snake toward the far-offblue places, toward the bright edges of the earth."

142. To seek these far-offblue places is, fo r Eberhardt, to seek oblivion. And to seek oblivion is, for Eberhardt, to he a smoker of kif. "An open wound," she describes a den of kif.

143. Near the end of her relatively brief life (she died at fo rty-four), many were calling Holiday's voice "rav­ aged"-hy dope, by booze, by abuse, by sorrow. Though no junkie, J oni Mitchell, too, now consistently hears the "ravaged" epithet. "If the health warning isn't enough

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to put you off cigarettes, the nicotine-ravaged vocals of the once angelic, now gasping J oniMitchell should," one reviewer recently wrote. "Mitchell's voice is a husky shadow of its fo rmer feather-light glory, mirroring how herjo yful,playful attitude has dwindled to bitter dissatis­ faction."

144. Then again, perhaps it does feel like a fre-the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling. I have spent a lot of time staring at this core in my own "dark cham­ ber," and I can testifY that it provides an excellent exam­ ple of how blue gives way to darkness-and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.

145. In German, to be blue-blau sein-means to be drunk. Delirium tremens used to be called the "blue devils," as in "my bitter hours of blue-devilism" (Burns, 1787). In England "the blue hour" is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell-abstract painter of the frst order, American expatriate living on Monet's property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of BLUETS

a famously nasty tongue, and creator of arguably my fa­ vorite painting of all time, Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973, the year of my birth-found the green of spring incredibly irritating. She thoughtit was had fo r herwork. She would have preferred to live perpetually in "l'heure de hleu." Her dear fr iend Frank O'Hara understood. Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days, he wrote, and did.

146. "When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child," Marguerite Duras once wrote. "It's a slur on the divine in our nature." In Crack Wa rs, Avital Ronell refers to Duras's works as "alchoholizations"-as saturated, so to speak, with the substance. Could one imagine a hook similarly saturated, but with color? How could one tell the difference?And if "saturation" means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does "saturation" not bring with it a con­ notation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experi­ ence?

147. "Rather than your fa ce as a young woman, I prefer your face as it isnow. Ravaged," a man tells the narrator in

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the opening lines of Duras's The Lover. For many years, I took these to be the words of a wise man.

148. The Tu areg wear flowing robes so bright and rich with blue that over time the dye has seeped into their skin, literally blueing it. They are desert nomads who were fa­ mously unwilling to be converted to Islam: thus their name. Some American Christians have been bothered by this idea of a blue people abandoned by God living in the Sahara, herding camels, traveling by night, and navigating by the stars. In Virginia, in 2002, fo r example, a group of Southern Baptists organized a day of prayer exclusively fo r the Tuareg, "so that they will know God loves them."

149. It should be noted that the Tu areg do not callthem­ selves Tuareg. Nor do they call themselves the blue peo­ ple. They call themselves lmohag, which means "free men."

150. For Plato, color was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry. He wanted both out of the republic. He called painters BLU ETS

"mixers and grinders of multi-colored drugs," and color itself a fo rm of pharmakon. The religious zealots of the Reformation felt similarly: they smashed the stained­ glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, de­ generate. For distinct reasons, which had to do with the fightto keep the cheap, slave-labor crop of indigo out of a We stern market long dominated by woad, the blue-dye­ producing plant native to Europe, indigo blue was called "the devil's dye." And before blue became a "holy" color-which had to do with the advent of ultramarine in the twelfth century, and its subsequent use in stained glass and religious paintings-it often symbolized the An­ tichrist.

151. Ultramarine is not, of course, holy in and of itself. (What is?) It had to be made holy, by the wicked logic that renders the expensive sacred. So frst it had to be made expensive. From the start, however, its preciousness stemmed from a sort of misunderstanding: ancient peo­ ples thought the shining veins in lapis lazuli were gold, when really they are iron pyrite: "fool's gold."

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152. Holiness and evilness aside, no one could rightly call blue a festive color. Yo u don't go looking fo r a party in a color that hospitals have used to calm crying infants or sedate the emotionally disturbed. Ancient Egyptians wrapped their mummies in blue cloth; ancient Celtic war­ riors dyed their bodies with woad before heading offto battle; the Aztecs smeared the chests of their sacrificial victims with blue paint before scooping their hearts out on the altar; the story of indigo is, at least in part, the story of slavery, riots, and misery. Blue does, however, always have a place at the carnival.

153. I've read that children pretty much prefer red hands­ down over all other colors; the shift into liking cooler tones-such as blue-happens as they grow older. Now­ adays half the adults in the We stern world say that blue is their favorite color. In their international survey of the "Most Wanted Painting," the Russian emigre team Vi­ taly Komar and Alex Melamid discovered that country after country-from China to Finland to Germany to the United States to Russia to Kenya to Turkey-most wanted a blue landscape, with slight variances (a balle­ rina here, a moose there, and so on). The only exception

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was Holland, which, fo r inscrutable reasons, wanted a murky, rainbow-hued abstraction.

154. It is tempting to derive some kind of maturity narra­ tive here: eventually we sober up and grow out of our rash love of intensity (i.e. red); eventually we learn to love more subtle things with more subtlety, etc. etc. But my love fo r blue has never felt to me like a maturing, or a refnement, or a settling. For the fact is that one can main­ tain a chromophilic recklessness well into adulthood. Joan Mitchell, fo r one, customarily chose her pigments fo r their intensity rather than their durability-a choice that, as many painters know, can in time bring one's paint­ ings into a sorry state of decay. (Is writing spared this phenomenon?)

155. It does not really bother me that half the adults in the We stern world also love blue, or that every dozen years or so someone fe els compelled to write a book about it. I fe el confdent enough of the specifcity and strength of my re­ lation to it to share. Besides, it must be admitted that if blue is anything on this earth, it is abundant.

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156. "Why is the sky blue?" -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Ye t every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the ques­ tion alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky de­ pends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary at­ mosphere viewed against the black of space and illumi­ nated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

158. God is truth; truth is light; God is light; etc.: the chain of syllogisms goes on and on. See John 1:5: "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness compre­ hended it not." (As if darkness, too, had a mind.)

159. A good many have figured God as light, but a good many have also figuredhim as darkness. Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose work and identity are BLUETS

themselves shrouded in obscurity, would seem to be one of the first serious Christian advocates of the idea of a "Divine Darkness." The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness fr om other kinds of darknesses-that of a "dark night of the soul," the darkness of sin, and so on. "We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the re­ alization that by not-seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge," Dionysius wrote, as if clari­ fYingthe matter.

160. Equally complicated: the idea of agnosia, or un­ knowing, which is what one ideally fnds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness. Again: this ag­ nosia is not a fo rm of ignorance, but rather a kind of un­ doing. (As if one knew once, then fo rgot? But what did one know?)

161. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was a fan of Wittgen­ stein's early work in logic, but he complained that the later Wittgenstein "seems to have grown tired of serious BLUETS

thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary." I am not sure if I agree, hut I note the temptation. So, I think, did Wittgen­ stein. "Explanations come to an end somewhere," he wrote.

162. According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness ap­ pears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright-a par­ adox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that fowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experi­ ment, may he, I am not as interested in it as I am in the fact that in Christian iconography, this "dazzling darkness" appears with startling regularity as blue.

163. Why blue? There is no basis fo r it in the Scriptures. In the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration-ground zero, as it were, fo r the onset of this "bright cloud" of ag­ nosia-the cloud is shadow, Jesus's raiment a "glistering" white. Ye t fo r the past two thousand years, in mosaic af­ ter mosaic, painting after painting, Jesus stands trans­ figured before his witnesses in the mouth of a glowing BLUETS

blue mandorla-a blue almond, or vesica piscus, the shape that, in pagan times, unabashedly symbolized Ve ­ nus and the vulva.

164. I do not know the reason fo r this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theolo­ gians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

165. Two of the blue correspondents-two flmmakers­ have just reported from the field to say that they have un­ dertaken a rescue project, a rescue of soon-to-he-lost blues. As the digital age steamrolls ahead, most films are being rapidly digitized. And as the digitization process privileges green over both red and blue, the correspon­ dents have decided to collect the blues that "fall out" of film during the transfer. They say they have to act fast. I do not know what they will do with their collection, or BLUETS

what fo rm, exactly, "fallen-out" blues will take. I imagine it will be a sort of muddle.

166. The 1939 flm The Wo men was shot entirely in black and white, with the exception of one Te chnicolor se­ quence-a fashion show-which was literally detachable from the rest of the film. This colored reel had no bearing on the plot whatsoever, so the projectionist could choose to insert it as part of the movie or ignore it altogether. Could one imagine a book that fu nctioned similarly, al­ beit in reverse-a kind of optional, black-and-white ap­ pendage to a larger body of blue (e.g., "the blue planet")?

167. I don't go to the movies anymore. Please don't try to convince me. When something ceases to bring you pleas­ ure, you cannot talk the pleasure back into it. "My re­ moval arose not out of a conscious decision, but was sim­ ply a natural fading away fr om flm," writes artist Mike Kelley. "We have become flmic language, and when we look at the screen all we see is ourselves. So what is there to fall into or be consumed by? When looking at some­ thing that purports to be you, all you can do is comment

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on whether you feel it is a good resemblance or not. Is it a flattering portrait? This is a conscious, clearly ego-di­ rected, activity." I find myself in agreement with him on all counts. Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or any­ one else fo r that matter. "I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology" (Artaud).

168. Cezanne, too, had had enough of psychology. He at­ tended, instead, to color. "If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance," he said of painting a man's face. This may be but a colorized restatement ofWittgenstein's remark, "if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be-unutterably-contained in what has been uttered!" Perhaps this is why I take the blues of Cezanne so seriously.

16g. Despite his falling away fr om film, Kelley remains charmed by Joseph Cornell's 1936 flm Rose Hobart, a collage of found fo otage of a jungle B-movie called East of Borneo. Using scissors and tape, Cornell cut East of BLUETS

Borneo down from 77 minutes to 191j2, fo cusing fairly ex­ clusively on shots of Rose Hobart, the movie's spunky fe ­ male lead. Cornell's instructions fo r the film state that it should be screened with a soundtrack of Latin dance mu­ sic, and that it should be projected through a deep blue filter, so as to bathe Rose in the color he so loved.

170. Cornell even coined a word to describe the sensation he hoped to produce by blue-tinting his work: "Blue­ aille." I have no idea how he pronounced it, which is fine by me-this way it can be "bluet" (like the flower), "blue­ ail" (like an affliction), or "blue-aye" (like Versailles, or blue-eye). Unlike Yv es Klein, however, Cornell had no urge to patent his invention (which is just as well, as you can't yet patent a sensation, thank God). Cornell was a gatherer, not an owner. He was also a builder of bowers, which he called "habitats," as befitssomeone who adored birds. "Day J and I gathered fr agments of blue dense," he wrote in an undated scribble.

171. When one begins to gather "fragments of blue dense," one might think one is paying tribute to the blue

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wholes fr om which they came. But a bouquet is no hom­ age to the hush. Over the years I have amassed countless blue stones, blue shards of glass, blue marbles, trampled blue photographs peeled off sidewalks, pieces of blue rubble fr om broken buildings, and though I can't re­ member where most of them came from, I love them nonetheless.

172. To stumble upon discarded canisters of a bad Holly­ wood movie, to cut the reels up in an effort to isolate the thing you love to gaze upon most, to project the resulting patchwork through the lens of your favorite color, along­ side a bustling "tropical" soundtrack: this seems to me, right now, the perfe ct film. But there is one other impor­ tant candidate: Warhol's Blue Mo vie, otherwise known as Fuck. "I'd always wanted to do a movie that was pure fu cking, nothing else," Warhol said, and in October of 1968, he did.

173· In July of 1969, Blue Movie was seized by the police fo r obscenity, and was then not screened publicly fo r years. When the obscenity issue faded away, one of its

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fuckers, Viva, suppressed the film on the grounds that she'd never signed a release fo r it. By �wos, Viva had ap­ parently changed her mind, and she appeared with the flm at several fe stivals. But as I saw neither it nor her, it would be unjust to say any more on the subject.

174. Mallarme might have felt otherwise. For Mallarme, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery fo rever preserved, like a bird's folded wing, or a fan never opened.

175. Viva to Louis Waldon, the otherfuckerinBlueMovie:

"We don't want to see your ugly cock and balls ... It should be hidden." Louis: "You can't see it." Viva: "Well, it should be hidden."

176. This idea has its charms, but I think it possible that I have watched too many blue movies fo r it to have a lasting hold on me. If you grow accustomed to wall-to-wall, even the slightest shred of mystery or plot can become an agi­ tation. Who cares why these people have found them-

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selves in this banal, suburban tract home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars-their orifices are. Let them open.

177· Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, fo r months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, hut what­ ever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to he the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

178. Neither Cornell nor Wa rhol made the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. For Warhol, fucking was less about desire than it was about killing time: it is take-it-or-leave-it work, accomplished similarly by ge­ niuses and retards,just like everything else at the Factory. For Cornell, desire was a sharpness, a tear in the static of everyday life-in his diaries he calls it "the spark," "the lift," or "the zest." It delivers not an ache, but a sudden

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state of grace. It might be worth noting here that both Warhol and Cornell could arguably be described, at least fo r periods of their lives, as celibate.

179. When I imagine a celibate man-especially one who doesn't even jerk off-I wonder how he relates to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he re­ gards it. At frst glance, this same question fo r a woman might appear more "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am in­ clined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fu cking-a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ej aculations of the heart.

180. I have not yet spoken of the princess of blue, which is somewhat intentional: it is unwise to give away too much information about a good dealer, and she has been, for almost two decades now, an excellent and primary supplier of blue. But I will say this: the other night I dreamed of visiting her in her fo rest. In the dream she was sitting cross-legged, as was I, but she levitated. She wasn't a deity--it was just that I had sought her and was

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now her guest. The forest was translucent. We talked. She told me that pollution, too, could be worshiped, simply because it exists. But Eden, she said, there's no Eden. And this forest where we're sitting, it doesn't really exist.

181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously re­ fuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything fr om an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fu cking.

182. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up fo r debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it-whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its fo rgetfulness. Given the mul­ tiple meanings of pharmakon, the answer is, in a sense, a matter of translation. BLUETS

183. Goethe also worries over the destructive effects of writing. In particular, he worries over how to "keep the essential quality [of the thing] still living before us, and not to kill it with the word." I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. Wh at does your poetry do?-I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language (]ohn Ashbery).

184. Wr iting is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, fo r instance, and half sober; I could have written half in ago­ nized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffiedaround countless times -now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running fo rward as one river-how could either of us tell the difference?

185. Perhaps this is why writing all day, even when the work feels arduous, never fe els to me like "a hard day's

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work." Often it fe els more like balancing two sides of an equation-occasionally quite satisfYing, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.

186. Another fo rm of aggrandizement: to make a sub­ stance into a god, even if one eventually condemns it as a false one. It was in an effortto puncture precisely this sort of embellishment that the French poet Guillaume Apol­ linaire opted to call his 1913 book of poems not L'eau de vie, but the more precise, much "cooler," Alcools.

187. Is it a related fo rm of aggrandizement, to infate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. -Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn awayfr om it?

188. How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.

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189. How often, in my private mind, have I choreo­ graphed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind. The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking.

190. What's past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.

191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. "If any­ one looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes fo r several days," Goethe wrote. "Boyle relates an image of ten years." And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.

192. Cyanosis: "a blueness of the skin due to imperfectly oxygenated blood, as fr om a malformation of the heart." As in: "His love fo r me produces a cyanosis" (S. Judd, 1851). BLUETS

193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further,that writing does do something to one's memory -that at times it can have the effect of an album of child­ hood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things-I don't want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me fu rther of them, so that I might become a better vessel fo r new blue things.

194. One can wish to he surprised (etat d'attente), but it is hard, if not impossible, to will being surprised. Per­ haps the most one can do is look hack and see that sur­ prises have occurred, chances are that they will again. "Though lovers he lost love shall not," etc. But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without oc­ casioning some degree of carnage.

195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the "original" thoughts

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themselves? (Please don't start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.) But if writing does displace the idea-if it extrudes it, as it were, like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole­ where does the excess go? "We don't want to pollute our world with leftover egos" (Chogyam Trungpa).

1g6. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many spe­ cifc memories of you fo r similar reasons. The most I will say is "the fucking." Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fo ol. "Oh, how often have I cursed those fo olish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public prop­ erty!" Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young We rther. Sei Shonagon felt similarly: "Whatever people may think of my book," she wrote af­ ter her pillow book gained fa me and notoriety, "I still re­ gret that it ever came to light."

197. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will fe el as if nothing ever happened be- BLUETS

tween us. This seems unimaginable, but the fa ct is that it happens all the time. "No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory/ of whiteness," wrote Williams. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too.

198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote "Famous Blue Raincoat," Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. "I always felt that there was an invisi­ ble male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don't re­ member." I find this fo rgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns.

199· For to wish to fo rget how much you loved someone­ and then, to actually fo rget-can fe el, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This accept­ ance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at

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others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking be­ tween them (seasickness).

200. "You cannot step into the same river twice"-a heartening anthem, without a doubt. But really this is but one version of the fragment left behind by Heraclitus, who was justly nicknamed "The Riddler" or "The Ob­ scure." Other versions: "On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow"; "We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not"; "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on." It seems that some­ thing is staying the same here, but what?

201. I believe in the possibility-the inevitability, even­ of a fr esh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: "No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." But I also sense something in Heraclitus's fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrifiedcheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity.

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202. For the fact is that neuroscientists who study mem­ ory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable "mem­ ory fr agment"-often called a "trace" or an "engram"­ or whether each time we remember something we are lit­ erally creating a new "trace" to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could he "scribbles," "holograms," or "imprints"; they could live in "spirals," "rooms," or "storage units." Per­ sonally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remember­ ing, I see Mickey Mouse in Fa ntasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling car­ toon stars.

203. I remember, in the eighties, when crack frst hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system fo rever, and you would thus never again he able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, hut I will admit that it scared me offthe

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drug. In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms­ if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, fo r ex­ ample, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

204. Lately I have been trying to learn something about "the fundamental impermanence of all things" fr om my collection of blue amulets, which I have placed on a ledge in my house that is, fo r a good half of the day, drenched in sunlight. The placement is intentional-I like to see the sun pass through the blue glass, the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones. But the light is clearly destroying some of the objects, or at least bleaching out their blues. Daily I think about moving the most vulnerable objects to a "cool, dark place," but the truth is that I have little to no instinct fo r protection. Out of laziness, curiosity, or cru­ elty-if one can be cruel to objects-I have given them up to their diminishment. BLUETS

205. One of the most vulnerable items is a scrap of paper that reads: you said you think of blue, written to me by a lover from long ago. Onto this note he pasted a square of ripped blue paper, which he then meticulously stitched back together. The whole apparatus is now falling apart -the stitches peeling off, the words fading. This seems just, as this lover was always breaking things then coming up with ingenious means of rigging them back together. In each place he lived, he built a bed high in the air served by a precarious ladder, then placed precious orchids on wobbly stands near the bottom of the ladder so that often one would knock the flowers over upon one's descent. This man had one tattoo, a navy blue snake, which I liked to watch dance against the white of his wrist when the rest of his hand had disappeared inside me. He got this tattoo to commemorate the night that all of his snakes died, a winter night in Connecticut when it was so cold and the heat shut off, so he put as many lights as possible against the snakes' cage to try to keep them warm. Then we fell asleep and the heat came back on and the snakes over­ heated and died. This was much worse than knocking BLUETS

over an orchid. This man once taught me how to kill a mouse by thwapping it against the table while holding on to its tail, you do that if the snake strikes and wounds but doesn't kill. It's cruel to keep the mouse alive, he said,just because the snake has lost interest. Eventually he got a new snake, a rainbow boa named Buttercup, a rope of in­ candescence. Buttercup's colors were a source of endless fascination to me, but she was five feet long and strong and I did not like to fe el her coil around my biceps if he wasn't in the room. Near the end, which neither of us quite saw coming, he said he had a surprise fo r me, and the surprise was another blue tattoo, this one a distorted circle at the base of his neck. It was very beautiful on him, very simple. I didn't live with it long enough to know about what it did.

206. Perhaps writing is not really pharmakon, but more of a mordant-a means of binding color to its object-or of fe eding it into it, like a tattoo needle drumming ink into skin. But "mordant," too, has a double edge: it derives

from mordere, to bite-so it is not just a fxative or pre­ server, but also an acid, a corrosive. Did I have this dou- BLUETS

ble meaning in mind when I told you, a little over a year ago, after it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were "etched into my heart"? I may not have known then that "etch" derives from etzen or ezjan-to be eaten-but in the days since, I have come to know the full meaning of the root.

207. I can remember a time when I took Henry James's advice-"Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"-deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would always be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either.

208. Cornell's diary entry for February 28, 1947: "Re­ solve this day as before to transcend in my work the over­ whelming sense of sadness that has been so binding and wasteful in past."

209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space

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made by God's absence. "Alcohol doesn't console," she wrote. "All it replaces is the lack of God." It does not nec­ essarily follow, however, that if and when a substance va­ cates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fillit. For some, the emptiness itself is God; fo r others, the space must stay empty. "Lots of space, nothing holy": one Zen master's definition ofenlightenment (Bodhidharma).

210. For Emerson, dreams and drunkenness were but the "semblance and counterfeit" of an "oracular genius." Therein lies their danger: they mimic-often quite well­ the "flames and generosities of the heart." I suppose he is advocating, in his "sermons," which steadily displace the God of theology with one of Nature, what we might now term "a natural high."

211. But are you sure-one would like to ask-that it really is mimicry,jumisterie? -Well,don't ask, but look. Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

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212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.

213. But are you certain�one would like to ask�that it was sweet?

214. �No, not really, or not always. If I am to enforce a rule of "brutal honesty," perhaps not even often.

215. It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, per­ haps, in front of it, tends to seem feeting, delusional. Of althe philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson fo r this idea: "As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected." Yo u don't believe him? He offers this quick test: "Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten." BLUETS

216. To day is the ffth anniversary, the radio says, of the day on which "everything changed." It says this so often that I turn it off.Everything changed. Everything changed. Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? "I grieve that grief can teach me noth­ ing," wrote Emerson.

217. "We're only given as much as the heart can endure," "What does not kill you makes you stronger," "Our sor­ rows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn": these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured fr iend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadri­ paralytic. The tepid "there must he a reason fo r it" notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious ac­ quaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of vi­ olence. She has no time fo r it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.

218. As her witness, I can testifYto no reason, no lesson. But I can say this: in watching her, sitting with her, help-

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ing her, weeping with her, touching her, and talking with her, I have seen the bright pith of her soul. I cannot tell you what it looks like, exactly, but I can say that I have seen it.

219. Likewise, I can say that seeing it has made me a be� liever, though I cannot say what, or in what, exactly, I have come to believe.

220. Imagine someone saying, "Our fu ndamental situa­ tion is joyful."Now imagine believing it.

221. Or fo rget belief: imagine feeling, even if for a mo­ ment, that it were true.

222. In January 2002, camping in the Dry Tortugas, on an island which is essentially an abandoned fo rt ninety miles north of Cuba, flipping through a copy of Na ture magazine. I read that the color of the universe (whatever this might mean-here I gather that it means the result of a survey of the spectrum of light emitted by around 200,000 galaxies) has fnally been deduced. The color of

8g BLUETS

the umverse, the article says, is "pale turquoise." Of course, I think, looking out wistfully over the glittering Gulf. I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue.

223. A few months later, back at home, I read somewhere else that this result was in error, due to a computer glitch. The real color of the universe, this new article says, is light beige.

224. Recently I found out that "les bluets" can translate as "cornflowers." Yo u might think I would have known this all along, as I have been calling this book "Bluets" (mis­ pronounced) fo r years. But somehow I had only ever heard, "a small blue flower with a yellow center that grows abundantly in the countryside of France." I thought I'd never seen it.

225. Shortly after fnding out about the bluets, I have a dream in which I am sent an abundance of cornflowers. In this dream it is perfectly all right that that is their name. They do not need to be bluets any longer. They are Amer­ ican, they are shaggy, they are wild, they are strong. They

go BLUETS

do not signifYromance. They were sent by no one in cel­ ebration of nothing. I had known them all along.

226. As I collected blues fo r this project-in folders, in boxes, in notebooks, in memory-I imagined creating a blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue obser­ vations, thoughts, and facts. But as I lay out my collection now, what strikes me most is its anemia-an anemia that seems to stand in direct proportion to my zeal. I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stum­ bled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone; the set, striked.

227. Perhaps this is as it should be. Wittgenstein's Trac­ tatus Logico-Philosophicus-the frst and only book of philosophy he published in his lifetime-clocks in at sixty pages, and offers a grand total of seven proposi­ tions. "As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do?" he wrote to his translator. "If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get noth­ ing more out of me."

9 1 BLU ETS

228. My irtiured fr iend is now able to write letters via voice-recognition software to keep her fr iends abreast of changes in her condition, of which there have been many. "My life can change, does change," she asserts-and it has, and does, often in astonishing ways. Nonetheless, near the end of these letters, she usually includes a short para­ graph that acknowledges her ongoing physical pain, and her intense grief for all she has lost, a grief she describes as bottomless. "If I did not write of the difficulties un­ der which I labor, I would fear to be misrepresenting the grinding reality of quadriplegia and spinal cord injury," she says. "So here it is, the paragraph that roundly asserts that I continue to suffer."

229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to re­ member that alwords, not just some, are written in water.

230. Holed up in the north country fo r the month of May, a May which saw but fo ur days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, ren­ dering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow pon­ cho, looking for blue, fo r any blue thing. I found only

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tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of frewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly fo r gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you're with. Love the color green. But I did not love the. green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.

231. That month I touched myself every night in my nar­ row bed and came thinking of you, knowing all the while that I was planting the seeds of a fr esh disaster. The dis­ aster did not come then, but it did come later. "Though six days smoothly run,/ The seventh will bring blue dev­ ils or a dun" (Byron, 1823). The most I can say is that this time I learned my lesson. I stopped hoping.

232. Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you.

233· That the future is unknowable is, fo r some, God's means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment. For others, it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign that our

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entire existence here is best understood as a sort ofjok e or mistake.

234· For me, it is neither. It is simply the way that it is. Whether this accident be a happy or unhappy one is probably more a matter of mood than anything else; the difficultyis that "our moods do not believe in each other" (Emerson). One can wander about the landscape looking fo r clues, amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never seems to decide the case.

235· "One thing they don't tell you 'bout the blues when you got 'em, you keep on fallin' 'cause there ain't no bot­ tom," sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Per­ haps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. Yo u have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. Yo u have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scan­ dal of corpses.

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236. Do not be overly troubled by this fact. "Nine days out of ten," wrote Merleau-Ponty of Cezanne, "all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an un­ known celebration."

237· In any case, I am no longer counting the days.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

239· But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone We il warned otherwise. "Love is not consola­ tion," she wrote. "It is light."

240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

(2 003-2006)

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Credits

THE PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS

Rebecca Baron, Joshua Beckman, Brian Blanchfield (aka Stu­ dent Blue), Mike Bryant, Lap-Chi Chu, Christina Crosby, Cort Day, Annie Dillard, Doug Goodwin, George Hambrecht, Chris­ tian Hawkey, Way ne Koestenbaum, Aaron Kunin, PJ Mark (aka Balarama), Anthony McCann, Sean Ne vin, Martin Plot, Janet Sarbanes, Mady Schutzman, Matthew Sharpe, Craig Tr acy (who supplied the ink), and my dearest Harry (who brought the light). THE PRINCIPAL SUPPLIERS

Ludwig Wi ttgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; Johann Wo lfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake.

OTHER SUPPLIERS

American Fo lk Art Museum; David Batchelor, Chromophobia; Vi ctoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette; John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiq­ uity to Abstraction; Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color; Patrick Tr evor-Roper, The Wo rld through Blunted Sight; The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online); Ver­ mont Studio Center.

OTHER APPEARAN CES

Some of these propositions first appeared, in various fo rms, in Black Clock, The Canary, The Hat, and MiPOesias. Grateful acknowledgment to their editors.

g8 DEDICATION

Fo r Lily Mazzarella first and fo re ver princess of blue.

BIOGRAPHY

Maggie Ne lson is most recently the author of Wo men, the New York School, and Other Tr ue Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007; winner of the 2008Susanne M. Glasscock Human­ ities Book Prizefo r Interdisciplinary Scholarship) and The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007; named a No table Book of the Yearby the State of Michigan) . She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 200S;final­ ist, the PEN/MarthaAlbrandAwardfo r the Art of the Memoir). A recipient of a Creative Capital/A ndy Wa rhol Fo undation Arts Writers Grant, she currentlyteaches on the fa culty of the School of Critical Studies atCalArts in Va lencia, California, and lives in Los Angeles.

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